


glory&gore

by vanillarouge



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: (Slightly), Alternate Universe - Hunger Games Setting, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Gen, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Polyamory, Sibling Incest, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-01
Updated: 2014-06-01
Packaged: 2018-01-27 21:44:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1723532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vanillarouge/pseuds/vanillarouge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once he told his cat he wanted to die of a broken heart and <i>fuck</i> if the universe isn’t laughing at him right now.</p><p>Or, in which Armin, Eren and Mikasa fall in love with blood in their hands and dirt in their hair, and it is cosmically unfair.</p>
            </blockquote>





	glory&gore

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Jay (Persephones-Flowers) for being an intimidating editor, making this better than it already was. But mostly thanks to me for being fixated on this AU for like four months until I decided to write it. I'm not known for finishing longfics so lets see how this goes. Feedback is appreciated as always.
> 
> Warnings for: Graphic depictions of violence later on, rated M anyway because I know bloodshed is not what you guys look for in the E tag.
> 
> For Sena and Jay.

 This isn’t right.

This isn’t _right_ , Armin is thinking, his heart thrumming, his body frozen in place, hands shaking, breath heaving, mind going a mile per minute as a peacekeeper takes him by the arm and begins pulling him toward the rattling makeshift stage.

There has to be a mistake.

And it feels like he's been hit by a train, and it feels like he’s been punched in the stomach, and the peacekeeper’s fingers are digging into his arm, creating fragile origami wrinkles in his shirt, and nothing is solid.

This shirt was his father’s. It doesn’t quite fit. The shoulders are too wide, the neck is too loose, the cuffs cover half of his hands instead of wrapping comfortably around his wrists, but at least he smells clean — like soap and fresh water, barely covering the pervading scent of smoke. Armin’s grandfather fixed his collar this morning. He looked at him from across the room, sitting near the window, the gloomy light of dawn casting shapes over his face, pale skin and dark shadows, making his fragility seem more pronounced than it should be. When he smoothed the fabric over his shoulders and back, his hands were rough and worn and patient.

Clothes should be handled with care, he used to tell Armin when he was younger, bending over the old sewing machine to fix a pair of jeans, torn where Armin scraped his knees when he was shoved and pushed and kicked to the ground, and he stubbornly held back tears all the way home.

He pushed Armin away with a pat on his shoulder, called him handsome like his mother and resilient like his father, and Armin though with a distant sort of sadness that there was a time when he had been pulled in close for comfort, cradled and held and lulled to sleep in quiet, tender voices, and he couldn’t be sure. He might have made it all up in his head from bits and pieces of eavesdropped conversations and pulled pages from library books.

There was a stern note in his grandfather’s voice when he asked, “How many times is your name in there, Armin?”

There was a pause. Then, sheepishly, a number.

The odds were never in his favor.

 

 

 

 

And so, from the Treaty of the Treason, in penance for their uprising, it was decreed that each year, the Twelve Districts shall offer up two tributes between the ages of twelve and eighteen at a public reaping.

Theses tributes shall be delivered to the custody of the city to be trained in the art of survival, and to be prepared to fight to the death, and then transferred to a public arena.

Henceforth and forevermore, this pageant shall be known as The Hunger Games.

 

 

 

 

There’s movement on his bed. A bundle of blankets slithers around on the ancient mattress, rustling the covers until a tiny head pops out and meows.

The Admiral isn’t particularly handsome or friendly, but it makes up for the occasional scratch and flea with the mice it catches every day. Sometimes Armin watches him from his bed for hours, playing with a frightened mouse, letting it go just to catch it again until he is too bored to eat the corpse.

“Snuggles,” he whispers from across the room, his brow furrowing delicately, skin origami.“Are you cold?”

He toes off his boots and closes the door behind him, turning the key. It is more for an illusion of privacy than actual safety, given the ancient cracks in his window, but old habits die hard. In the dimness of his room, there’s something that resembles secrecy enough to slide his newest acquisition from under his shirt, tucked in the waist of his pants.

_The Happy Prince._

In the very lowest echelons of the populace, there are so many much more pressing concerns to worry about that a love for banned texts and the collecting thereof is seen as a strange quirk at best, and a waste of time at worst. He exchanged it for more pastries than his grandfather would approve of at the old black market, where literature is a rarity. Even if the great majority of written material from before the the Dark Days weren’t banned, a taste for literature is just as rare as the sugar delicacies he exchanged it for. Under his childlike excitement, he barely registers the hunger that comes with having given up all the meals for the day. Sugar isn’t cheap.

The cat hisses at him, and Armin rolls his eyes. He’s given up on being liked by the ugly thing a long time ago, even if he loves him to pieces. He rescued the cat from being cooked by his grandfather the winter he turned nine, and they’ve been inseparable since then. Armin has been, at least. He has scars to confirm it.

“ _May I ask_ ,” Armin reads to the cat from a haphazard page, with a posh inflection. “ _Were you born like that, or is it the result of an accident?_ ” The Admiral, with his protruding lower jaw and scarred face, seems to take offense in this, and mews low and threatening from under the covers. Armin giggles.“This book is already so real.”

He sits on the bed as stealthily as he can, lying down in the narrow space the cat has left him.

“' _Dear little Swallow,' said the Prince,"_  He reads out loud once again, book open to a different page in that way he has to read haphazardly before going in order. It’s a different short story. “ _You tell me of marvelous things, but more marvelous than anything is the suffering of men and of women. There is no Mystery so great as Misery_.'”

The Admiral mews. Something in Armin’s chest tightens.

There is a certain vulnerability to the regular habit of exposing oneself intimately to the written ideas of people who lived yeas ago, decades. Irony is a delicacy not many have the pleasure of knowing. Armin places the book against his chest, stares at the ceiling. He stares for a long time.

Life is not easy in the lowest districts. It’s tedium and suffering and ashen misery, being condemned to an unremarkable life from the moment you’re born till the moment you die. If you’re lucky, from old age. If you’re not as lucky, from hunger or sickness or fistfight gone wrong.

And, if you’re uniquely unlucky, you might do it on national television.

 _In another life, maybe_ , Armin thinks, not without a trace of melancholy. More often than not he wonders if it’s masochistic to ponder all these scenarios every day in which he makes a break for it and is never seen again. If he’s only torturing himself when he makes up complicated plans in his head for hours at a time, when the simple idea of things ever changing seems inconceivable enough to go through somber and sad and loop back all the way to kind of funny.

Sometimes he’s alone, fleeing his district, never to be seen again. Sometimes there’s people with him, with smiles that reach their eyes and eyes brighter than Armin has ever seen. They cross the fence, way past it, and never stay in the same place, freed and untraceable.

There’s not much else he has going but the books and the cat and the pipe dreams. He keeps to himself in school, does his work quietly at school, makes only polite small talk in the public market and the bakery. He cannot remember the last time he had a meaningful conversation with anyone other than his grandfather.

And even then, his grandfather is a reserved man, the system carved so deeply into his bones that questioning it is unthinkable because it’s all he knows. When Armin was little he used to scare him to death with the things he would blurt out about their district, and the people who rule the country, and what is outside the miles and miles of fence that keep them compliant. Eventually Armin understood this would only lead them to more trouble.

Sometimes his grandfather says he takes after his parents. Armin never met them, but they left pictures, and journals and rare, treasured books, and that’s what keeps him alive sometimes, that knowledge. That the life he has known since he was born is not the only one. That he shouldn’t have to wake up screaming, sometimes, in the middle of the night. That there’s things to see, places to visit.

He wants to go everywhere. He wants to see everything.

They say ignorance is bliss and yet, the thought of unawareness, of living in the dark, seems harder to bear than knowing there’s something more to this life of dullness and hunger. Throughout history, knowledge has always been a sort of rebellion.

Rebellion.

“Happy Hunger Games,” he mumbles to no one in particular, and then, he lets out a sardonic breathy laugh.

This seems to startle the Admiral, who pushes his head against Armin’s shoulder. Armin blinks, turns his head towards the skinny thing. He puts the book away and opens his coat. It takes the cat a while to approach Armin, like it’s pretending to be nonchalant, before climbing onto his chest anyway. He’s warm. Armin closes his coat over him and hugs him to his chest.

The Admiral purrs silently, the vibration comforting, like a lullaby. He smiles and scratches behind one of his slightly bald ears.

“I’ll finish it tonight,” Armin mumbles, eyes going heavy. He was up before the sunrise, sneaking outside their house to ensure that, if there was a book in the Hob, it wouldn’t be sold as a firewood substitute before he could get to it. After a moment of hesitation, he swallows. “I’ll finish it after the reaping.”

The Admiral turns its head in a quick motion and bites Armin’s finger. It’s more of a warning than an attack, and Armin stays still until the cat lets him go. They have an agreement that has worked ever since “Admiral Snuggles” wasn’t an embarrassing name. And it is his name for a reason.

Armin falls asleep with the cat huddled against his body, and they keep each other warm, and warm means alive.

 

 

 

 

In his dreams, there’s color.

The ashen dullness that seems to pervade the entirety of his existence ebbs away to a world of color so bright and vivid, he is certain it doesn’t exist in real life.

The ocean, fearsome and vast and devastatingly beautiful, raging and furious like it’s trying to push Armin’s boat over, and he revels in its violent force and power, drenched to the bone, his fingers trembling and coiled onto a rope for dear life.

Neon orange sandlands and wilderness clashing with cerulean skies, scorching and fierce. Flat, salty white landscapes of kaleidoscopic illusions and giant sprouts. Secret meadows filled with wildflowers and soft grass, bubbling streams, the sun tinting everything golden.Volcanic islands turned calderas of life. Underground limestone caves with gorgeous turquoise waterfalls. Wet and windy coast paths stretching on for miles. Forests suffused with towering trees older than life itself. Isolated oasis of natural springs and fertile land in the middle of spectacular stretches of desert.

Water, fire and ice and rich, full earth - from giant crystal caves to blazing volcanoes to rock formations that in another life could have been called works of art.

The ocean, calm and docile and heartbreakingly beautiful, tidal waves delicate and soothing, white foam and crashing waves at the shore, tender and sweet, like it’s waiting for him with open arms. His parents are there sometimes, unrestricted and self-governing, existing somewhere beyond this life of ash and misery.

He wakes up to the Reaping sirens.

 

 

 

 

Armin dresses like an old man, shuffling in carefully pressed shirts and covering cardigans, and soft, muted colors. Beige and blue and big creamy buttons. It would be safe to suspect that these were not his clothes originally, but they are worn and gentle against his skin, kind where out there isn't, and so they stay. He concentrates on the way his sleeves catch on his thumb, too long to fit him properly, as he stands in the neatly formed lines in the town square. It helps to focus on small things, rather than the looming feeling of dread on the horizon.

The procedure for the Reaping is always the same.

When the clocks hits one clock, the whole population gets herded into the town square, young and old, unless you’re dying or wish to do so. His grandfather squeezes his shoulder before he goes to the outer perimeter of the crowd, and Armin vaguely thinks of how a band-aid is supposed to hurt less when it’s ripped quickly.

He signs in with the peacekeepers, gets his DNA sampled. Shuffles into his respective roped area, the older kids on the front, the younger on the back. Soon enough the Mayor reads his list of victors, explains the rules as if they were new to anyone, plays that same old video, _it is both a time for repentance and a time for thanks._

Armin hears but does not listens. This is his fifth year. His skin has grown thick to terrorizing techniques.

“Happy Hunger Games,” The cheerful woman with her Capitol accent and sugary smile is saying, bright and bubbly as ever. “It’s an honor to be here today!”

Her dress is pompous and dramatic, and it is red. Traffic light red, fire red, guts red. It’s an omen, almost, and it makes Armin’s stomach turn, just a little. He wonders if she did that on purpose.

She says they are blessed. She says it’s an opportunity to be there, a great one even. She says this is a way to heal. As if hearing the same speech, over and over again would somehow make them believe it. Maybe she’s mocking them. Maybe it’s her job to mock them. Maybe she believes it herself.

Armin starts to pay attention once she walks up to one of the bowls by her side, as always, ladies first. He knows there are some boys’ names in there, shoved into the first bowl just because of some meaningless assignment at birth. This whole event is designed to bring misery even in the tiniest details. At least they’re consistent.

Her hand dives into the bowl, swirls around experimentally for a few seconds and pulls out a single slip of paper. The crowd has gone silent.She walks back to the microphone, and clears her throat, and unfolds the piece of paper with her long red nails.

A girl from his class is chosen.

Armin doesn’t know her, has never really talked to her, he would have probably never have been friends with her. The terrified looks on her face as she steps out from the crowd is enough to chill his blood, make him dig his nails into the palms of his hands. He’s never been good at being close to people but he is good at reading them, at deciphering them, and the kind of dread he sees makes him a little dizzy. It always does.

No one steps up to volunteer for her.

She bursts into sobs, and it doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t reverse her sentence. It doesn’t make things fair.

The announcer pats her shoulder with her silk-clad hand and quickly moves onto the next container. “And onto the boys!” She says, dipping her hand in the bowl with a flourish that doesn’t impress anyone but herself.

She smooths out the paper and clears her throat.

It’s not _fair_ , Armin thinks.

She takes in a breath—

 

 

 

Once he told his cat he wanted to die of a broken heart and _fuck_ if the universe isn’t laughing at him right now.

 

 

 

From the moment he stands up on that stage, no one expects him to survive. 

He’s sixteen.

He keeps banned books under his bed and turns doorknobs like he's opening a safe, pulls his hair out of his face like he's drawing back a curtain. He is quiet in class, smart but prone to daydreaming, looking out of the window like he's moved to a safer place inside of his head a long time ago. He helps his grandfather run a bakery and matches his socks, irons his shirts like he's twenty years behind times, broke his left wrist when he was nine, lost his parents to the uncharted territory behind their mousehole district.

After a moment of hesitation, the peacekeepers let him go.

They detach their fingers from Armin’s arms like they were welded, a bloodcurdling disjointing motion leaving behind what will become bruises embed in pale skin under worn-out fabric.

It’s that particular sensation, the eerily familiar ache that comes before a bruise - hematomas appear when capillaries break due to a blow to the skin- that ties him down to his body, makes his eyes prickle with tears.

If he cries now, he is doomed. If he cries now, when they televise the replay of the Reapings that night, the whole Capitol will make note of the way his chest heaves like he’s forgotten how to breathe, of the convulsive gasps that come with sobbing, the soft whimpering sounds, and he will be marked an easy target. A puny person. Feeble, insignificant, weak.

He swallows, and gives no one the satisfaction.

His voice echoes when he climbs onto the stage and takes his place, says his name into the microphone. His eyes search a crowd of people he has known his entire life, and no one claps. They look at him like they’re mourning.

But I’m still here, Armin thinks vaguely in the back of his mind, with a strange sort of certainty.

His hands are trembling and his heart is beat-beat-beating in his ears like it’s trying to break free, like it’s conspiring against him, ready to shorten his days like it would have mattered.

“Well, well, well,” The cheerful woman with her Capitol accent and sugary smile is saying, bright and bubbly as ever. “What a handsome, brave young man! Let’s give a big round of applause to our newest tribute!”

There is only blaring silence in return from the crowd. Dissent. We do not agree. We do not condone. All of this is wrong. And if the pastel announcer is uneasy, if she notices the misery around her, it doesn’t show.

Instead she pushes his hand to the female tribute’s hand, raises their joined fists like it’s a death sentence.


End file.
